


Long Shadows

by VivWiley



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Backstory, Gen, ambiguous tension, random AU sometime after everything ends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 04:20:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivWiley/pseuds/VivWiley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shadows follow us across all the unlikely distances, even through the nights.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Shadows

The eyes followed him through the night. Soft growls behind him, the quiet steps of the predators heard underneath the rustling of the leaves, through the sighing of the wind. He could sense the hot breath, the sharp teeth of the merciless maws of the beasts that lurked. Always they were out there. 

Had been out there for more than 20 years. 

He pushed on. Moving along the trail with a practiced ease; smooth gait carrying him forward in search of his target. The slightly chill air a scarcely noticed detail. He had a mission, a goal, and those that followed him had patience. They would bide their time, as they always did.

He had other concerns tonight. He was close, he thought, to finding him. To finding him, and then...well, he would figure it out when he got there. For now there was only the search, the pursuit. Something he did so well.

His noiseless progress through the woods was the product of years of experience and training, and as the automatic reflexes took over, the forest he hiked through fell away. A small, feral part of his brain continued to direct his relentless search, while the rest of him was pulled backward into the memory that never really left him....

"Alexi, come here." The words in English, blurred by the guttural, soft harshness of the underlying Russian accent. The marriage of the two languages that he had been raised since birth to hear, speak, and understand.

Strange, though, to hear English all about him now--in this foreign land, this place he had never expected to see. Strange to be suddenly aware that he was Russian. That he was somehow foreign and out of place. For the first time, he was aware of a sense of secretiveness. Of a need to hide who and what he was.

Instinctively he wanted to tell his father to be quiet. To not betray their identity. Their otherness. He turned away, pretending for just a moment to not know the older man. Telling himself that his reasons for shunning his father had less to do with his adolescent embarrassment over his father's slightly worn clothing and crumb-flecked lapels, and more to do with a need for continuing their secrecy, their anonymity.

The great halls echoed with the ghosts of pillaged civilizations. The relics and plunder of a now-faded empire housed here, in the glass cases that had been their resting place for more than 100 years. But still the statues and mummies and vases seemed newcomers. They, too, had an air of being lost--startled to be there, plucked from their golden, sandy, hot desert to awake in the chill grey climes of England. Banished from the lands they had been created in. Realms and kingdoms that had long since vanished--dust to dust.

The vast rooms of the British Museum swallowed up their small party of visitors. They had spent the afternoon wandering the mostly empty museum. The late winter season leaving London surprisingly bereft of tourists. Finally, they had come upon the hall with great Egyptian antiquities. 

The boy drifted away from the others. Overwhelmed by the grandeur of all that he had seen that day. Fragmentary images of the myriad paintings and artifacts slowly burning their way through his brain. A kaleidoscope still turning and shifting in his mind. He stared unseeingly at the items in front of him, until the images resolved themselves into something sharper, more coherent.

The hieroglyphics and images on the papyrus scrolls and tomb walls were yet more strange and alien. The symbols clearly telling a story that had a meaning far beyond any time or place. He moved from case to case, looking at the strange writing, trying to understand this unknown language, which somehow resonated deep inside him. Then at the end of the chamber, he saw a large temple-like structure, the shadows of the interior calling to him.

Standing in the reconstructed ante-chamber of a tomb, the sand colored walls rising up around him, he wanted to reach out and trace the hawks, eyes, and ankhs that were incised on the surfaces in front of him. He was reaching out to touch one as his father called him again. "Alexi!" A rare impatience now running through the deep, familiar voice. 

He turned and joined the man standing at the far wall of the room. Noticing for the first time the grey streaking the back of his father's hair. 

"What is it, Papi?" Pitching his voice low, trying to erase the accent he knew could be so readily discerned.

"Look, look here." In his excitement, he reverted to Russian. "This is Anubis. The Gatekeeper of the Underworld. He weighs the heart of the dead--see there? He is balancing the Pharaoh's heart against a feather. It doesn't matter how great a man is in life, in front of Anubis, it only matters what he was as a man. What his actions were. What his thoughts were."

The boy felt his heart clench. Realized he was holding his breath. In limbo, an agony of waiting, wondering, how could anything in the world be balanced against a feather and not fail? The dark enigmatic eye from the god's profile pierced him. Seeing straight through him--sideways--and finding him wanting. The dark eyes whose weighing heaviness he would unexpectedly find again on the other side of the world, years later.

He was twelve now, and aware that he was not really a boy any more. But not yet sure of what it meant to be a man. What it would mean for him to be a man. He knew only that there was so much left for him to learn and very little time left to learn it.

His father was still talking. Explaining about the consequences of failing Anubis' test. Of having your heart devoured by the jackal. He could feel the hollow pit of his stomach aching. Imagining the vast bleak nothingness of having your heart devoured and then an eternity of emptiness. He wanted to stop his father. To halt the torrent of words that painted the vivid picture of the results of failure. That gloomy enjoyment of tragedy that only a Russian can fully appreciate. Tried to ignore the sudden urgency of his father's tone, the underlying message.

"...Purity of actions and thought, Alexi. That is what is important. You must always remember who and what you are--things will change for you very soon now. But no matter what, no matter where you go, you must always remember that there will be an ultimate judgment. That the scales will wait for you at the end. So you must be ready."

And then abruptly they were leaving the museum. Stepping out of the great doors of the building, he found himself blinking against the surprisingly bright light of the February sunshine, his eyes watering in the unexpected, piercing brightness of daylight.

He found himself wanting to turn, to go back into the cavernous museum, to seek out the ancient shadows of those artifacts. To fade quietly into the remembered and forgotten history that echoed in those halls. 

He followed his father back to the hotel. And then later to the airport. Where he boarded the plane for New York, in the company of the man he was now instructed to call "uncle," despite the Mediterranean features and crooked teeth that looked nothing like him and the strange measured way of speaking that frightened him so much at first. After that flight, nothing was ever the same. Except the eyes of the jackal-headed god, which followed him through his dreams. Always.

Melodramatically, a hooting owl brought him out of his reverie. He suppressed a laugh with the same act of will that he used to suppress the shiver that wasn't quite terror.

The forest reasserted itself into his consciousness. His senses sharpened, and led him. A pull deeper and deeper into the woods, leaves brushing by him, almost seeming to part for him. 

He was the hunter. And he had found his prey. Just ahead of him. There. There in the small firelight. Asleep.

Alex Krycek stared down at Skinner for a long moment, and then sank down into an unconsciously graceful crouch. Waiting.

 

The eyes of the predator watched him from across the campfire. Skinner very carefully did not blink. Simply sat up slowly and watched back.

He had awoken suddenly from an uneasy sleep to find Krycek, crouched in the clearing, watching him silently from across the fire. It unnerved him to realize that his former agent and enemy had been there for some time before he'd registered his presence, in the deep pull of his sleep. He was getting old--soft--and it occurred to him that he might not have the opportunity to regain any of his former skills and instincts. He had waked already reaching for his gun, but half-way through the motion had stopped and stilled. Somehow deciding that there was either not the time or the need for his weapon.

Krycek put up his hands to show they were empty. Not so much to show that he wasn't carrying a gun, but a silent acknowledgment of the power he had once wielded over Skinner. Krycek had given Skinner that particular control unit when all the smoke had finally cleared--complete with instructions on how to disable it--but Skinner had always believed there was more than one.

Long silence. The sounds of the night reasserted themselves in his consciousness. Snap and spark of the fire. The crisp flat smell of the smoke. The waiting spooled out--stretching endlessly across space and time, looping back on itself in the stillness of the night that was never quite still.

It had been three years since the fall of the Syndicate. Each of them--Mulder, Scully, himself, that smoking bastard, and even Krycek --had played their roles. Investigated, informed, testified, and when need be, killed. And abruptly, unexpectedly, it was over. Simply over. The mop-up that followed was long and tiresome, and then one day Skinner had found himself at the end of a 25-year career in the FBI and needing to get out. Needing a change. 

It would have been nice, he acknowledged, to work in the Justice Department and have a fighting chance to actually try to enforce justice. But, he was dirty. Had been sullied by his deal with the smoker, and all that he had been a witness and party to. He was no longer the man he had once been. He had stepped back and forth across the lines separating the many sides so often that in the end there had been nothing of certainty left for him. And, he had to admit, he was simply weary.

Formally, he'd taken a leave of absence--a six month sabbatical—but he knew he wasn't coming back.

He had gone up into the woods of northern Arizona to get away. To try to make sense of all that had happened. The connection of that area to the Anasazi and the Navaho partly driving his choice. The ancient culture of the Native Americans one lure, the relative isolation of the mountains a much bigger draw.

He had been hiking and camping off and on for about two months now. Going back down to the small towns to replenish supplies, but mostly just drifting through his days, absorbing a small measure of peace back into his soul, knowing that he would have to make some decisions about "what next," and knowing that he yet had time to make those decisions.

For now it was enough--more than enough--to simply be. To allow himself to exist in a sort of half-light. To walk comfortably in a world, that for once, had no lines.

He had become a creature of the shadows. 

It was, he supposed, some kind of supreme irony, or perhaps twisted commentary on his life, but here, in the middle of a successful career as a bureaucrat and agent of justice, he was simply one more shadow among other shadows.

Skinner was a man who appreciated irony, but tended to try to avoid it. There were times, though, when it was simply inescapable.

And here, now, in this isolated location out of time and place, he wondered if his destiny had come looking for him, or if the game was simply beginning again. It was difficult to decipher his emotions about either.

He had learned and relearned patience in the strange journey that had been his life, but there was a time to stop waiting. He shifted a little more upright. Raised his eyebrows in a silent question. Watched with bemusement as Krycek visibly relaxed.

"I don't know." It was an odd thing to open with, and Skinner gave a tiny grunt of surprise.

"I don't know what I'm doing here, Skinner. It's just...."

For a brief moment Skinner wondered if he were still dreaming, and then decided that even his strangest subconscious wanderings couldn't come up with this one. He waited out Krycek's indecision for another long moment.

"How did you find me?" He strove for a neutral tone, trying to keep the underlying 'why?' from surfacing too sharply.

A barely noticeable shrug. A voice as studiously indifferent as his own. "Wasn't all that difficult. You used your credit card at the lodge at the entrance of the national park. After that it was just a question of checking the trails. That did take some time." The last sentence spoken with something that felt like either amusement or a tone that was much more dangerous.

Skinner tried not to think about what might have provoked this unlooked-for meeting. Then found that he was past the point of playing power games. Whatever this was, he had to assume that Krycek had some purpose in mind. And he was too old and too tired to beat around the bush.

"Why?" The tone now naked, and he found he didn't care.

Now Krycek's eyes shifted--away for a moment, distant, searching—and when they returned, the gaze was harder, but something uncertain as well. "I told you: I don't know. I don't know...." 

Suddenly fluid movement across the flames and Krycek was standing, looking down at him for a long moment. Small shrug, and he slouched around the fire, to sit next to Skinner. Close, not quite touching. The cool night turned suddenly uncomfortably warm. 

He found he didn't want to look at the other man. He didn't want to fall into the trap of the past and the land-mined fields of memory. So he turned his gaze directly into the fire. Allowed himself to be caught up in the changing light and shapes of the flames, the slowly changing shapes of the logs as they transmogrified from potential into raw energy.

"You're a long way from home, Skinner." The voice was softer now, blurred by the night and the dark.

"We all are." It seemed to sum up everything. The past nine years, and maybe all that had come before.

"I don't have a home." Skinner was left with the impression that Krycek hadn't meant to say that. It seemed uncharacteristically open. The tone for once transparent and yet strangely unself-pitying. He waited out the ensuing pause with even less patience than before.

"I'm...I'm sorry." Krycek's voice was sheetmetal grey. It was the last thing he expected to hear, and so he reacted badly. "What?!" The whipcrack of anger unavoidable, but too hot, too sharp. He felt Krycek flinch, caught a hand movement in his peripheral vision that might have been a reach for a weapon. Skinner consciously schooled himself into stillness. Into a borrowed quiet. "What?"

He wasn't sure Krycek would answer him. He wasn't at all sure that Krycek wouldn't simply stand and empty a clip into him and leave as silently as he had come. He didn't know which he was more afraid of--the uncertainty of Krycek's answer, or the certainty of death. He had been dead before. It was, at least, a known quantity.

The minute ticked by with leaden, precise slowness.

"It wasn't my idea," voice stubbornly persistent. Controlled in a way that was frighteningly unfamiliar. "I carried out their instructions, of course, but it wasn't my idea."

There could be no doubt to what he was referring. The nanites. The things that still lurked somewhere in his body and that would no doubt kill him one day, one way or the other.

But, why this? Why now? He tried to make sense of his former agent's--his former controller's--words. Tried to untangle the twisted connections that had bound them in so many unlikely ways. Tried to trace them to a source, an origin that stubbornly remained elusive. Left with no sense of meaning in the solidity of Krycek's words, he was left to decipher the tone behind them. To try to read the slant and slump of Krycek's shoulders. 

The easy thing to do, of course, would be to offer some vague words of reassurance. Forgiveness even. But they were beyond him, as was coherent thought.

"I see." The tone dry, almost academic. He didn't see anything, of course, but he had to say something, anything.

Krycek moved restlessly next to him, and Skinner had the distinct impression that he was about to stand and flee. 

"You came all the way out here just to tell me this?" Impossible to keep the tone level now--the raw edges of anger shining through, nearly covering the fact that he wanted the answer with a dangerous need.

A snort that could have been anything--contempt, amusement, unthinking animal sound. "Would you believe me if I said yes?" A bleak humor crackling softly.

Skinner found himself catching his breath, an unconscious gasp. Waited out his reaction. Tried to feel his way around the edges of the knife that seemed to be at his throat. "I gave up belief for Lent this year. Somehow never got around to taking it back up."

And now the snort was humor. He could feel a shift in atmosphere, a small clearing that shortly gave way to a new danger, a tightening of a garrote around an exposed neck. A breathless, charged silence.

 

The tone that was almost light was more than he deserved. As was the fact that Skinner hadn't simply picked up the gun that lay beside him and shot him between the eyes. It would have been fitting, he thought, in the darkest, most melodramatically Russian part of his soul, for Skinner to take that sort of splashy revenge. It was also, he realized, simply not the man's style.

If cornered, Krycek had to admit that he was long past the need to deny or explain this. Long past an ability to attempt to even understand it. He had made a decision, so very long ago, that he would not try to look beyond certain boundaries. He recognized that this would be interpreted by some as cowardice. For the first time, he found himself wondering what he was truly trying to mask from himself.

But there was yet more that he needed to say. It was hard—this nighttime conversation. This strange, almost reasonable meeting to discuss matters that had once truly been questions of life and death. He wondered again at the paths that looped and contorted and brought him to this place.

"There's... there's more--I didn't want to..." How to explain his essential charade? His entry into the whole game that had been his life, and yet was not something he was sorry was over, for all that without it, he no longer knew who and what he was. 

Oddly, Skinner seemed to catch at least some part of what he meant. "Don't be an idiot." The growl was familiar now, reassuring. "You made your choice. We all did. And, there were no good choices." A pause that somehow Krycek knew not to break. And then softer, "There were no heroes at the end, you know."

The echoed regret and something that tasted like longing were so familiar from his own half-remembered emotions that he almost started. Habit and a sudden chill kept him rooted to the spot. Paralyzed in the heat-chill of the fire-lit circle.

"They came close, though, didn't they?" 

"Yes. They did. But you and I both know there was a price for that."

He was lost then, in a haze of memories that would not resolve, no matter how he tried, into focused, tangible, linear images. Instead, he was assaulted by a jumble of imprecise recollections that left him aching along the axis of his soul. Not so much for what had happened, but for all that hadn't.

Victory, it would seem, would be for him always an ambivalent prize.

He turned to look at Skinner out of the corner of his eye, realizing for the first time that he had been calmly watching him the whole time.

"Do you hear from him...them?" Horrified to hear the revelation of the question voiced aloud.

Skinner simply watched him for a heartbeat, or thirty, and let the question die quietly.

Krycek turned back to the fire, allowing himself to be mesmerized by the light and shadows. He felt Skinner's gaze finally turn away. Heard the shift and rustle and Skinner leaning back, waiting with him. Waiting with a patience that would have seemed like wisdom in another man.

There was no reason to stay, and yet he could not move. He hadn't thought much beyond this point. Strange realization for a man who never entered a room without having a clear escape strategy.

Restive movement behind him, and he snapped from his reverie to see the fire beginning to die--grey ash crumbling into embers that sparked and glowed lower and lower. Skinner quietly fed more wood into the blaze, carefully nurturing the flames, and then settled back again, but it was too late. The mood, or whatever it was, had vanished. 

Krycek stood gingerly, imagining for a brief moment that he might cut himself on the shards of the broken silence. Skinner rose with him and stood observing him with the impassive eyes of a statue.

He looked at Skinner, surprised to find that he could meet his eyes clearly. Could, for just a moment, pitch headlong into his gaze, which in the ambiguous light of the night and the fire was nothing but unreadable surfaces that flickered and hid what he had long believed to be treacherous and tempting depths.

He took a step forward, drawn into the heat and hardness of the body in front of him--magnetic north calling him, mindless, heedless. He breached the first molecular frontier of Skinner's space; felt Skinner's hands reach up and brush down his arms, linger for just a moment.

"Alex." Warning warring with an underlying warmth. 

It was, oddly, the warmth that caught at him--a cold glimmer of sanity, and he stepped back and away, and away.

He appreciated the fact that Skinner didn't ask him where he was going--Mulder would have. But Mulder had always wanted more than he could or should be allowed to have: more information, more space, more access, more....just more.

He looked back at the clearing, now almost too distant to see clearly. Realizing that all he could see were the dying embers of the fire, and the silhouette of a broad shouldered figure who might have been a statue, or a figment of his imagination for all that he could truly see. For a brief moment he thought he saw a sudden black-red flash of ancient eyes. 

He turned away. He had other places to go. Others to find. And the ones behind him were getting restless.

As he strode back through the woods, he hunched his shoulders against the cold. Shoved his hand deep into the pocket, reassured by the solid weight of the body-warmed gun resting there. Underneath the weapon, his fingers snagged on something soft and brittle---unfamiliar. He stopped dead in his tracks as he withdrew a feather from the pocket. It glowed mourning dove grey-white in the moonlight.

Behind him he could hear the howling of the jackals in the desert.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The characters and situations of The X-Files are the property of 1013 and Fox. No infringement is intended; no profit will be made.
> 
> For S, sent to the underworld far too soon, but whose heart will not be found wanting.
> 
> Notes: This story was written in 1999, and was, by the time I first posted it in 2002, basically an AU story, since the show took a couple of turns I couldn't anticipate. For a while I thought it was going to be a chapter in a longer work, but the rest of the story never revealed itself to me, so I'm posting this now. 
> 
> As always, I owe deep thanks to Meredith for many, many things, among them wonderful editing. 
> 
> Anubis was an ancient Egyptian god. He was the son of Osiris and Isis. He was depicted as having the head of a jackal. He guided the souls of the dead from this world into the next. He also weighed the actions of the deceased in the presence of Osiris, the ruler of the underworld.


End file.
